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New lesson: “Harm & Distrust”
Learn about the historical failure of mainstream news organizations to serve all people equally, the legacies of distrust this has caused among specific groups in America — particularly Black Americans — and recent efforts by news outlets to improve their coverage. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the “Harm & Distrust” lesson yet, you can preview it in the Content tab or in the course management area. And here’s the at-a-glance lesson information and the parent/guardian letter about the lesson.
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New and up-to-date lesson examples
One of the things educators and students love the most about Checkology is how up-to-date and relevant the examples are. To keep things relevant, we perform regular audits of Checkology content. This year, you’ll find new and up-to-date examples and assessments in several Checkology lessons, including InfoZones, Understanding Bias and Branded Content.
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New "Related Resource” guides
In addition to lesson guides, transcripts and answer keys, we also now offer Related Resource guides in the “Resources” tab of your Checkology educator account. These guides help you learn about all the free NLP resources related to each Checkology lesson. Depending on the topic, you’ll find links to quizzes, classroom activities, viewing and listening guides and more!
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New student growth measure questions
Checkology’s pre- and post-assessment questions help you measure student learning gains and track student progress toward meeting news literacy standards over time. Plus, anonymous aggregate student growth data helps NLP better understand student learning patterns and improve the platform. As a mission-driven nonprofit organization, this data helps us demonstrate to our funders and supporters that our resources actually work so we can keep Checkology free! This year, we have updated many of the pre- and post-assessment questions in order to keep student growth measures relevant and focused on the most pressing news literacy learning goals. You can view all the student growth measure questions in the “Resources” tab or view student progress by visiting the “Pre/Post Assessment” tab.
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More “Newsroom to Classroom” journalists
As you may know, your Checkology educator account gives you access to a feature called “Newsroom to Classroom.” This free feature allows you to invite a journalist to visit your classroom either virtually or in person. There are more than 150 journalist volunteers in our directory, with more added each year. Even if you’ve connected with a journalist previously, you can have a brand-new experience with journalist visits in 2023-24 to extend your students’ Checkology learning! Invite a journalist to share their expertise with your students today by going to the “Journalist Visits” tab. Check out our step-by-step guide to having a journalist visit or see how other educators have used journalist visits in their classrooms.
Keep in mind: Checkology and all NLP resources are free!